Top News, Articles, and Interviews in Philosophy

From Rules to Meanings: New Essays on Inferentialism

21. May 2019 Philosophy News News
2019.05.17 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews Ondřej Beran, Vojtěch Kolman, and Ladislav Koreň (eds.), From Rules to Meanings: New Essays on Inferentialism, Routledge, 2018, 357pp., $145.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781138102613. Reviewed by Preston Stovall, University of Hradec Králové This volume was produced in response to Jaroslav Peregrin's Inferentialism: Why Rules Matter (2014), and it brings together the work of a number of established and junior philosophers working within this tradition. The essays are grouped into four sections: language and meaning; logic and semantics; rules, agency, and explanation; and history and the present. Collectively they survey some of the ongoing and historical developments in inferentialism, and they lay out guidelines for a systematic and integrated view of the world and our places in it as rational beings. This lends the essays a degree of coherence it can sometimes be difficult to find in edited collections. With an introduction that canvasses the intellectual background of... Read [More]
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Actualism and Possibilism in Ethics

20. May 2019 Philosophy News News
[New Entry by Travis Timmerman and Yishai Cohen on May 20, 2019.] Suppose that you have been invited to attend an ex-partner's wedding and that the best thing you can do is accept the invitation and be pleasant at the wedding. But, suppose furthermore that if you do accept the invitation, you'll freely decide to get inebriated at the wedding and ruin it for everyone, which would be the worst outcome. The second best thing to do would be to simply decline the invitation. In light of these facts, should you accept or decline the invitation? (Zimmerman 2006: 153). The answer to this question [More]
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Planning, Time, and Self-Governance: Essays in Practical Rationality

20. May 2019 Philosophy News News
2019.05.15 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews Michael E. Bratman, Planning, Time, and Self-Governance: Essays in Practical Rationality, Oxford University Press, 2018, 272pp., $29.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780190867867. Reviewed by Elijah Millgram, University of Utah One might well suppose that a philosopher's collection of essays -- this is Michael Bratman' third -- would be simply a progress report, in this case on an evolving view of the role of planning in our lives. Of course it is that, and avowedly, but not simply: throughout his career, Bratman has made a point of intervening in debates that bear on his own position, and when he addresses the two related discussions that take center stage here, it exposes a reemerging and very important disagreement about the ground rules in philosophy of logic. In Bratman's view, part of understanding what plans are and what they do for us is to see a handful... Read [More]
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Structured Propositions

17. May 2019 Philosophy News News
[Revised entry by Jeffrey C. King on May 15, 2019. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] It is a truism that two speakers can say the same thing by uttering different sentences, whether in the same or different languages. For example, when a German speaker utters the sentence 'Schnee ist weiss' and an English speaker utters the sentence 'Snow is white', they have said the same thing by uttering the sentences they did. Proponents of propositions hold that, speaking strictly, when speakers say the same thing by means of different declarative sentences, there is some (non-linguistic) thing, a proposition, [More]
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